Many known chemical products such as surfactants, plasticizers, solvents, and polymers are currently manufactured from non-renewable, expensive, petroleum-derived or natural gas-derived feedstock compounds. High raw material costs and uncertainty of future supplies provide a need for the discovery and development of surfactants, plasticizers, solvents, polymers, and other chemical products that can be made from inexpensive renewable biomass-derived feedstocks and by simple chemical methods. Using renewable resources as feedstocks for chemical processes will reduce the demand on non-renewable fossil fuels currently used in the chemical industry and reduce the overall production of carbon dioxide, the most notable greenhouse gas.
It is desirable to provide commonly used chemical products, such as surfactants, plasticizers, solvents, polymers, and the like from renewable feedstocks as a source of chemical building blocks. There is further a need for chemical building blocks that are at least one of chemically and thermally stable. It would be a still further advantage for the chemical building blocks to have multiple functionalities for subsequent reactions. Moreover, it is desirable to provide such materials by simple and/or and reproducible methods.